


faster than your fastest pace

by mundanememory



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Dream Sharing, Friends to Lovers, M/M, POV Alternating, Pining, gratuitous use of color imagery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-01
Updated: 2019-11-01
Packaged: 2020-12-01 19:17:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20872178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mundanememory/pseuds/mundanememory
Summary: November of 2018 is a windfall. Patrik and Kyle are millionaires.At night, Kyle slips into Patrik's dreams, bringing American red and white into a world of Finnish blue.Kyle doesn't believe it at first. How could he believe that he's sharing his dreams with the roommate he's in love with, the roommate who's hung up on somebody else? But Patrik pushes deeper and deeper into Kyle's subconscious, assertive just the way he always is, and Kyle starts to push his luck."Dream about something you like," Kyle says.Dream about me.





	faster than your fastest pace

**Author's Note:**

> i can't even begin to explain how much ive wanted to write this fic for the past little while! i kept trying and trying and it kept coming out not quite right, but i finally finished it and im so glad. ive really wanted to write patrik/kyle for a long time, ive wanted to write unrequited patrik/nik for a long time, ive wanted to write dreamsharing for a long time, and of course ive wanted to write about november 2018 since november 2018. what a weird/wild/fun month. and of course the narrative is even more delicious knowing the heartbreak that came with the rest of the season!
> 
> title comes from lana del rey's song california! lana and taylor's recent albums both had this weird recurring motif of "blue" and i absolutely adored it and co-opted it for this. also ps the timeline is correct in terms of games played / goals scored, but in terms of the schedule of flights / what hotels they stayed in when, i just did whatever was most convenient so thats probably all inaccurate
> 
> i know that this ship is literally non-existent but /I/ care about it! and thats all that matters!

  
**1, 2, 3**

**P.L.**

The first game in Finland is an away game, technically. Patrik smiles to himself as he tapes his socks, finding humor in the fact that the first NHL game he’ll ever play in front of a home crowd will be in white. He watches as Nikolaj dances around the locker room goofily, twirling a roll of tape on his finger and hyping the boys up for the game. Some of them, especially Adam, are looking catatonic in their stalls, still not over the jet lag. 

Nikolaj laughs with his mouth hanging open in a grin. But as he spins, his and Patrik’s eyes meet. Patrik’s grinning back, unable to suppress his own obvious affection, but when Nikolaj meets his gaze his smile and his step falter. Patrik realizes what he’s done a millisecond too late and his own grin drops off his face. He looks at the floor, scratching the back of his head.

Things have been weird this fall. Patrik wishes he could turn back time, go back to May and the high of playoffs in the back hall of Connor’s basement and smack some sense into himself and shut his own mouth. Things were perfect the way they were. It was just fine and dandy living in his own fantasies with no expectations and no disappointments.

_You’re so beautiful, Nicky_.

_Let me make you mine_.

Two sentences can ruin your entire fucking life.

Something hard and plastic lands roughly in his lap; his helmet, thrown unceremoniously at him by Kyle. “Let’s get this one going, eh _leijona?_ Do it for the homeland.” The pronunciation of _leijona_, lion, is shredded in Kyle’s American accent but the sentiment is there. Kyle nods at him stiffly and Patrik nods back. 

Patrik’s never been good at keeping secrets. Growing up, he had such a hard time keeping his emotions under the surface of his skin. He was always getting in trouble, screaming at coaches and throwing gear against walls. These days he’s got a few fancy breathing techniques and an entourage of sports psychologists but no one to teach him how to hide a crush. He followed Nikolaj around, tugging on his sleeve, for two years and everyone else understood how things worked well enough to never say anything about it. Everyone except Patrik, apparently.

Now Patrik and Nikolaj don’t room together and Patrik and Nikolaj don’t game together and _Patrik-and-Nikolaj_ isn’t much of anything anymore. Patrik’s spent the first month of the season getting dribbled around the lines like the pre-game soccer ball and now he’s landed next to Kyle. Quiet, reliable, American as apple pie Kyle.

Patrik is decidedly not as American as apple pie and certainly not as Canadian as a double double. They’ve flown the whole team halfway across the planet just because of how un-Canadian Patrik is. He’s so un-Canadian that they made him a holiday, they built a spectacle just for him and Sasha to show themselves off and say _kiitos_ at the end of it.

Patrik figures he should capitalize on the opportunity, with every family member he’s ever met in his entire goddamn life in the stands, so he scores. Then again. And one more time just to see the hats fly to the ice. Just to see Sasha shake his head with a wry smile and say, “Ever the showman, Pate,” as they skate by one another, Sasha in red and Patrik in his away white.

“You’re fucking crazy, man,” Kyle says with a shake of his head on the bench as the highlight reel plays on repeat on the screen. “You’re absurd. Craziest fuckin’ player I’ve ever played with. I’m so fuckin’ proud of your crazy ass.”

To Kyle, everything is _crazy_.

“I bet you dream of scoring,” Kyle says in the hotel room, flat on his back in only his boxers. “I bet when you close your eyes, it’s just: wrister, wrister, wrister, bardown every time.”

“No, I try not to take work home with me,” Patrik replies solemnly. Kyle barks out a laugh. Then, more seriously, because he can’t help himself and he needs to talk about it or he might die: “I still dream of… of him, sometimes.”

Kyle’s smile pinches into a taut frown. He sits up in bed. “No more thinking about… that, okay?” His voice is unsure. “We’re in Finland, for God’s sake! You just scored a _hat trick_ in _Finland_. How about you dream of more goals?”

“I’d love to.”

When Patrik falls asleep, he dreams of an endless highlight reel, Kyle on his other wing and Bryan in the middle, the prettiest goals he could ever imagine coming from his blade, the puck soaring past the goalie as if time had stopped.

He wakes up and his limbs feel as heavy as if it were the mid-April physical beatdown of playoffs. His back has been bad lately, but this feels like his legs and arms are weighed down to the bed.

“Finally awake over there, eh sleeping beauty?” Kyle’s pulling his clothes on, toothbrush hanging out of the corner of his mouth. “Get the fuck up, we’ve got another game today.”

“I dreamed of more goals,” Patrik says vacantly.

“Huh? Oh!” Toothpaste spills down Kyle’s chin. “Ha! That’s crazy. Now you just gotta score another hatty today, alright? Use the good vibes!” Kyle’s buzzing around the room, messing with his suit and zipping into the bathroom to wash his mouth out, but Patrik lies still on the bed as if magnetized. 

Kyle’s his new roommate. Kyle just gave him his first good dream in five months, the first dream in a long time where he hasn’t felt haunted by a ghost of something that never existed. There’s a whisper at the back of his neck, but Patrik just sits up and combs his hair back down over it. 

**4**

**K.C.**

Patrik’s weird, but cool in the locker room. He seems less nervous than yesterday. It’s good, because Patrik has ways about him that no one fully understands, but everyone can tell when he’s in a good way and when he’s in a bad way. And right now it feels like Patrik’s in a good way for the first time in a long time.

The goals help, too. He’s grinning and taping his stick in his fast little motions, his long fingers deft at their work, sitting confidently in his stall. Players like Patrik feed off success. When one thing goes well, another goes well, then some more things, then before you know it he’s on a tear.

Patrik’s like a little brother to Kyle, ‘cause he’s always off doing something stupid and crazy. Or maybe Patrik’s like an older brother, because he was in his sophomore season when Kyle _finally_ made the team full time and he needed someone to help him with all the stupid rookie things a rookie’s gotta do. Or maybe Kyle doesn’t want Patrik as a brother at all.

Patrik skates circles in warm-up like a shark stalking his prey. He looks good, seems dialed-in. Kyle’s pretty sure he can hear the contingent of family and friends screaming for him in their designated box. He got three for them yesterday. Kyle knows it’s unlikely, knows it’s crazy, but wouldn’t it be wild, wouldn’t it be so perfectly _Patrik_, if he could get them a few more today?

Patrik only (_only_, Kyle laughs to himself) scores once, but it might just be the prettiest goal Kyle’s ever seen in his life. He watches the replay in awe, as the puck seems to bend around the unsuspecting Roberto Luongo. Yeah, Roberto fucking Luongo. As in, goaltending legend Roberto Luongo. The same guy who didn’t register Patrik’s shot coming until the light went off. Patrik shrugs on the bench, unimpressed.

Kyle hugs him and rubs his filthy glove palm in his face. Just to touch him.

After the game, they stuff their faces with wings and beer. They harrass Patrik for the address of a nearby karaoke place, even though Patrik refuses to come along. He shrugs off Kyle’s pleading sleeve-tug to go back to the hotel with Barkov. “C’mon!” Kyle whines.

“No, no, I can’t. You know I can’t.” Patrik’s staring through Kyle, not even looking at him. Kyle knows who he’s looking at. Patrik disappears into the Helsinki night and Kyle goes to karaoke, Adam falling asleep on his shoulder as Jacob and Andrew drunkenly sing Post Malone.

He gets back to the hotel with a migraine and some mild nausea. Patrik’s lying in bed on his phone. His blonde hair is sticking straight up from his head, bent in weird directions from his beanie.

“Hey KC,” he says, not looking up.

“‘Sup,” Kyle says in reply, sitting on the bed and kicking off his shoes.

“Dunno. Can’t sleep.”

Kyle hums in response, still undressing, pulling off his already loosened tie.

“What should I dream about tonight?”

“Huh?” Kyle doesn’t understand. He looks over at his road roomie. Patrik’s on his side and his corners of his mouth are pulled up unevenly in a smirk that Kyle’s grown fond of.

“Last night I dreamt of goals.” Patrik says it like it’s obvious, like he’s not crazy for thinking that Kyle actually had anything to do with his dreams.

“You’re not serious.”

“Why not? It worked last time.” Patrik shrugs with one shoulder.

“You’re weird, you know that?” Patrik shrugs again and Kyle smiles in spite of himself. But Kyle is selfish, and he can’t help himself. He walks between their beds and puts a hand on Patrik’s head, on the spikes of blonde.

Patrik’s hair is soft and messy. Patrik is soft and messy. His face is peppered with moles. Kyle’s thumb brushes his forehead. “How about you dream of another good night? A night where nothing’s hard.”

“_Hyvää yötä_,” Patrik says. Kyle raises his eyebrows. “Good night,” he translates. Patrik doesn’t speak much Finnish around the guys unless Sami’s around, but Kyle decides that he kinda likes hearing it. He wants to kiss his Finnish mouth, hear Finnish words against his skin. His arms turn to jelly when he thinks about it, and he takes a stumbling step backward from Patrik’s bed. 

He sits back and pretends to be chill. “Alright, weirdo. Good night.” Kyle crawls into bed. He thinks about a good night, the best possible night. A night where Patrik could want him, even. He could kiss him in English or in Finnish and fall into bed with him, learn whether the language of touching one another is different in Finnish. Finnish words and Finnish hands and Finnish gasps of pleasure.

Kyle doesn’t normally remember his dreams, so when he appears in a hazy scene, a half approximated memory of cobbled together pieces of different teammates’ basements, he’s disoriented and feeling for the edges. He’s in comfortable clothes, feet warm in his socks. When he turns one direction, the boys are playing games on Connor’s massive TV. He turns the other way to find Benny’s kitchen counters, pristine white marble covered in homemade baked goods. He spins again, still trying to find his bearings, and Nikolaj and Patrik are laid out kissing on Mark’s white couch.

Kyle turns away, embarrassed. He finds himself looking through tall glass windows that face an unfamiliar landscape, trees and a glassy lake that stretches out toward a starry sky. It’s nighttime and Kyle isn’t sure where he is or how he got there. He tries to look down at his own hands to orient himself but he finds nothing. He has no body nor form to anchor him to the placeless experience. Falling backwards, a thought registers quietly: _another good night_, and he jerks awake in a Helsinki hotel bed.

Patrik’s asleep in the other bed. Kyle’s clammy and he can’t fall back asleep for a long time. In the morning, he won’t be able to shake the memory of the dream, and he won’t want to believe that it was what he suspects it was. It was just a coincidence. Kyle thinks about Patrik all the time these days. There’s nothing weird about a dream.

He also has a hard time falling asleep on the long plane ride back to Winnipeg. He thrashes around in his seat and takes long walks up and down the cabin. Every time he sits back down Josh looks at him like he’s crazy. He looks across the aisle, where Patrik is sitting with Mathieu, and sees two open blue eyes, awake and alert.

  
**5**

**P.L.**

When things work, they _work_. Patrik isn’t about to question the whims of whatever shooting voodoo he has, because things are finally starting to look up after a terrible October. They don’t play for another week after they get back from Finland, the league letting them get back on North American time, but Patrik doesn’t have problems with time changes anymore.

He feels good, maybe better than he’s ever felt on the ice. He doesn’t think too much about his back, because it always hurts a little. He doesn’t even think about Nikolaj, most days. He’s too caught up thinking about Bryan and Kyle and how good it feels to play with them.

When they finally get to play another game, it’s Colorado coming to visit them and he stands by the bench chirping Mikko during warm-ups. Mikko is so _nice_ to everyone with no question. They spend summers together in Turku and Mikko knows him better than almost anyone. Not better than Nikolaj, but thinking about how well Nikolaj knows him makes his stomach turn.

“So what was _that_ display last week?” Mikko asks.

Patrik swings his stick out at Mikko’s ankles in a halfhearted slash. “I always give people a show, you know that.”

“Drama queen,” Mikko chirps.

“If I’m gonna score fifty this year I need to catch up from last month.” It’s easy to say things like that in the second week of November. Fifty! Fifty’s the magic number this year. Just six more than last year. That shouldn’t be hard at all. Then he’ll come back next year with a tidy new contract and buy a house that has no memories. That Nikolaj has never been in.

“This is why people call you cocky, you know.” Mikko lowers his voice even though it’s not like anyone can understand them.

“People can believe whatever they want.” Patrik doesn’t give a fuck about what people think of him. 

Nikolaj cuts up the ice behind him, skating warm-up laps. Patrik doesn’t even need to turn around to know it’s him. He knows the sound of his skates; Nikolaj’s the best skater in the league. It just sounds _different_ when it’s his blades on the ice.

Mikko watches him freeze. “You need to get laid,” he says. Mikko heard enough of Patrik’s ails over the summer, and was sufficiently tired of it by the time training camps started rolling around.

“I need time,” Patrik replies. It’s still too fresh, fresh as the cut up ice behind him.

Mikko opens his mouth but before he can offer up some Denver prospect’s phone number (again), Kyle’s shouting, “Yo Patty! Line rushes! Stop flirting and get the fuck over here!”

Mikko grins. “Wow, didn’t realize you were flirting, Pate! We should grab dinner.” He winks overdramatically. Patrik swats his ankles again, harder this time. “Ow!” Mikko whines.

“Shut up, you big baby.”

As Mikko turns away to his own team, he calls over his shoulder, “I know you love home, but you shouldn’t leave your heart in Europe! North America’s not that bad, eh?” He coats the “eh” in a overdramatic Canadian accent.

Patrik shakes his head and skates away. After warm-ups he stands beside Kyle on the bench and listens to the Canadian and American national anthems. Kyle closes his eyes during the American one. Patrik flutters his eyes shut but the words wash over him without getting into his head. He likes the one line about _the rockets’ red glare_, but it doesn’t mean much to him.

He scores during the game. That’s all he needs to do. Eight down, forty-two to go. Goals are the proof of his value. If he scores goals, he’s worth a brand new fat contract and then it _really_ won’t matter all the things they say.

Kyle walks out with him after the game into the parking lot, chatting about nothing. His hair is getting longer and it curls out the back of his beanie, dark and barely red in the low light. Patrik kind of wants to touch it. He likes his hair long.

“Gonna keep growing it out?” he asks, giving himself an excuse to reach up and tousle the hair sticking out.

Kyle laughs. “Yeah, I think so. I kinda like it when you rock the flow, man. We gotta get the rest of the boys on it. Gotta love the lettuce on the boys, y’know?” Patrik snorts at Kyle’s slang, the distinctly American pull of his voice.

When they reach Kyle’s car, Patrik wants to call out to him, ask what he should go home and dream about. But they’re not on the road, and Patrik doesn’t want to mess with the shooting voodoo he got from them rooming in Finland. So instead he just silently waves and goes home alone.

He dreams of Kyle anyway. He dreams of American afternoons, flags on boats and fireworks in the sky. Patrik’s never felt like he belonged in North America. He’s always been an interloper, not quite right in words or face. He opens his mouth but he can’t speak, stuck in the grass in someone’s backyard, American summer sun overhead. The flag has fifty stars and dream-Kyle’s hair is as red as the stripes. 

The dream is static, solidly fixed on the scene. It feels like he’s standing in a painting, all the colors too bright and his voice still stuck in his throat. Kyle stares at the flag. Patrik counts stars on the flag and freckles on Kyle’s sunburned back.

Patrik falls through the grass and then they’re in the locker room in January. The Canadian flag hangs on the wall and everything is marked with the Jets logo. Kyle’s back says eighty-one. A scrawled reminder on Patrik’s wrist says fifty. Kyle’s hair is as blonde as Patrik’s now. 

The dream kicks into motion like a buffering video. Kyle turns and reaches out to Patrik. He grabs the wrist of Patrik’s sleeve, where the ink is still wet underneath. Everything is red and white but Patrik is blue to the tips of his fingers that are laced with Kyle’s.

When he wakes up it’s November and the world is orange in the autumn sunrise.

**6, 7, 8**

**K.C.**

They have three more games at home and Patrik doesn’t score in a single one. They’re still playing well but it’s not coming. Kyle hasn’t remembered any of his dreams since one weird one a couple of days ago, though Patrik still jokes about Kyle changing his dreams.

Kyle says, “Don’t be stupid,” and tries to forget the distorted faraway almost-memories of Patrik in his backyard on a summer afternoon, in only swim trunks with his hair wet, looking sad but beautiful in shades of blue.

“I’m just saying!” Patrik says, following Kyle onto the team jet. “Maybe we have good roadie energy. With, y’know, the dreaming…” he trails off, waggling his fingers between their foreheads, miming whatever crazy voodoo he believes in and doesn’t have the words to describe. Kyle rolls his eyes and slides into his usual seat, letting Patrik get distracted by the card game Mathieu always robs him blind at.

They land in Vancouver the night before the game, off to start a four-game trip. Patrik claims the bed closer to the window and performs his ritual of pulling out the hospital corners of the sheets so they hang loose. He dives onto the mattress and sighs in contentment.

Kyle hangs his suit and messes with his bag, feeling the need to stretch his legs after the flight. His phone buzzes in his pocket, and he ignores it until he’s settled in. He kinda likes Patrik’s way of thinking, so he follows suit and tugs the sheets of his bed out too before sitting down and pulling out his phone.

The guys in the chat are talking about hitting up some place Tyler likes for dinner. It sounds pretty good, and Kyle sneaks a sideways glance over at Patrik, trying to deduce if he’s reading along with the messages. “You coming out with us?” Kyle asks. He stands and shoves his feet back into his shoes.

“Eh,” Patrik says. “Don’t really wanna.” He doesn’t look up from his phone. His socked feet hang off the edge of the bed.

“God, you’re the most antisocial hockey player in the world.” Kyle crosses his arms. He wants Patrik to come along, and then he feels stupid for wanting it. Selfish, even. Patrik’s on the introverted side and needs a break after a long flight; Kyle already knows he’d be miserable at dinner, sitting to the side messing with his fork while everyone laughs. Nikolaj will be there, and Kyle isn’t sure he believes Patrik when he says he’s getting over it.

Patrik rolls over onto his stomach. “I’m comfy here though, and I see the guys every day.” Kyle sighs and kicks his shoes off. “You should go, though, if you want,” Patrik reassures.

“Nah, I’ll hang with you.”

They order room service and eat on the floor, sitting in their socks. Patrik makes Kyle laugh about the most random things. He tells stories from Tappara and Kyle falls back on the carpet with a belly laugh. They leave their dishes on the carpet and continue talking even when they’re curled up in their respective beds, whispering until they both slip into sleep.

When Kyle comes to himself, he’s in a nondescript room, everything blue and out of focus. He tries to rub his eyes clear but he doesn’t any hands to reach out with. He turns to orient himself in the room. Far away, down a long hallway, Kyle can see a figure laid out up ahead, a pale body on the blue floor.

He approaches it, gliding silently through the air without feet to take steps with.

The room spins and warps and wobbles, unbothered by the laws of physics. Kyle recognizes that he’s in a dream; the more weird dreams he has, the more he’s become attuned to them. He doesn’t shock awake at the realization, though. Instead he approaches the body on the floor.

He doesn’t need to examine the face under the white hair or the body peppered with moles to know who it is. Kyle circles the body. He’s lean but broad, a body built for sports. 

Patrik looks straight through him.

Kyle’s uncomfortably aroused when he wakes up, leg shaking under the bedspread. It’s already too bright in the room, so he pulls a pillow over his head. He takes a couple raggedy breaths into the pillow, trying to remember what day it is. What month it is.

It’s still November, and Patrik is still feeling good and being weird. He wears a normal suit and an outlandish bowtie into the arena in Vancouver that night, grinning proudly when the boys chirp him mercilessly for it.

He shoots mercilessly, scoring three more goals and leaping into Kyle’s arms as he screams proudly. “Another fucking hatty! Are you fucking kidding me! You’re a beast! You’re an animal!” he yells, shaking Patrik’s shoulder and babbling at him on the bench as the Jumbotron shows the replay.

After the game, they don’t talk again until they’re landed in Calgary and are settled in the hotel room. Kyle watches TV on the flight, feeling comatose. He hates the west coast travel, long flights in the dead of night. Time isn’t real on these flights, everything slowed to a stop in the weird intangibility of the airspace. Loosely, Kyle thinks of when Patrik scores and the moment seems to hang in the air, when the puck flies so fast it’s as if time is stopped and everyone is frozen around it. Then, bardown _ping_ and everything starts again.

Kyle hits the bed in Calgary and Patrik pulls out the hospital corners, and time starts again. The fan whirs on the wall, circulating new air into the room. The entire room is beige, from the walls to the carpet to the bedspread.

“Make me a nice dream tonight, KC,” Patrik says, lying on his side in bed, looking at Kyle.

“For the last time—” Kyle rolls his eyes and tries to forget “—I don’t have any influence over your dreams.”

“I haven’t dreamt about _him_ since Finland,” Patrik says simply. “I’ve been dreaming good things. Nice things.”

November is a windfall; they’re millionaires. Kyle thinks about the _nice things_, about Patrik blue and long and elegant in his dreams, eyes vacant but body so tangible and present. He wishes Patrik would dream about _him_, that Patrik’s faraway gaze wouldn’t be trained on someone who couldn’t possibly look back.

“It’s just a, a _thing_ for you, isn’t it?” Kyle asks, waving his hands as if there was some scoring magic Patrik knew the secrets of. Dreams are another thing for him, like growing his hair out or wearing the same suit over and over when he’s on a roll.

“Guess so.”

“Well, I dunno,” Kyle admits. “Dream about something you like. Dream hockey dreams.” 

Kyle hopes Patrik dreams about him, then squeezes his eyes shut and tries to cancel it because he doesn’t know if he can take another one. As he falls asleep, he decides that he shouldn’t be worried, because it’s impossible to make someone dream something. It’s all just a series of strange coincidences. November will be over soon.

He remembers his dream again. He and Patrik are in a hotel room, the kind of one Kyle stayed in before he was fully moved into his own apartment in Winnipeg. Back when life was transitory and the future unsure. Kyle doesn’t know how he got here but it’s strangely familiar. He runs his hands over the soft bedspread; somewhere it registers in his mind that his body is there and he’s not just a disembodied conscience this time.

Patrik’s on the floor icing his back. The sight is familiar, him shirtless and bent over his phone, looking uncomfortable. Kyle watches the twitch of his lips as he scrolls through texts on his phone. He remembers every moment of falling in love in perfect clarity, so different from the hazy curves of these dreams. He remembers the first time he saw Patrik, the first time Patrik laughed and Kyle felt like he got the wind knocked out of him, the first time Patrik laid down next to him on Blake’s floor during a Bombers game and Kyle knew he’d let his feelings go too far.

So when Patrik goes to the bathroom to dump the ice and then comes back into the hotel room to lean over Kyle, he knows it’s not real. It’s not real because the edges are hazy and ill-defined. It’s not real because the moments slip away as fast as they come. If this was a memory, Kyle would remember everything down to the color of Patrik’s socks. Patrik bends down to crawl along the bed and straddle Kyle’s body and Kyle’s already forgotten what they were doing a moment ago.

He knows it’s not real when Patrik catches his mouth in a kiss because it’s not the right amount of stubble, not quite, and when he reaches up to twist his fingers in Patrik’s hair it’s not the exact right length.

Kyle kisses him anyway. Patrik kisses like he shoots the puck, hard and direct and out of the blue. Every movement takes Kyle by surprise. Patrik kisses Kyle’s mouth and neck and the hollow of his throat, leaving a tiny trail of fading marks behind him.

Kyle’s skin flushes red and when Patrik pulls away for air, his eyes are blue. He’s so blue. Kyle jerks awake, sitting up in shock in the Calgary hotel bed, and when he looks over to Patrik in the other, he can see the whites of his eyes contrasting against the blue of the night. He turns away, unable to speak, and after a long period of silence he lies flat again. He’s not sure how long he stares at the ceiling until he falls back asleep.

In the morning, Kyle showers and finds a purple bruise on his collarbone; it is irrevocably a hickey. He presses it, unsure where it came from. He shakes his head in disbelief. It’s probably just from the game in Vancouver. Who knows. Hockey players always have bruises they can’t explain.

Patrik’s awake in bed when Kyle emerges from the bathroom, and neither of them says anything. Kyle isn’t sure what was real and what was a dream, what actually happened last night when he woke up and saw Patrik was awake too. It could’ve just been a trick of the light.

They go downstairs and find Bryan, and then they go to skate. A life lived between hotel rooms, always half-packed in a suitcase and ice collected from machines down the hall, is the life of a hockey player. A life of mysterious bruises and feeling so close to your teammates that you might even be able to convince yourself they’re in your dreams.

  
**9, 10**

**P.L.**

Patrik hasn’t thought about Nikolaj since the roadie started. It’s contradictory, because he’s thinking of Nikolaj now. He’s stretched out with a trainer getting a few knots rolled out, a bad bruise painted all the way down his side from a big hit in the second period of last game.

But when he sees the bruise, his first thought isn’t about Nikolaj but rather the purple mark on Kyle’s collarbone, the one that can’t possibly be real. It can’t be real because the dreams are just _dreams_ and nothing more. Kyle must’ve hooked up with someone at some point, probably back in Winnipeg.

The guys tease him about it in the locker room and Kyle goes dark red. “No, it’s nothing,” he insists, but Jacob’s already imitating girl moaning sounds and the rest of the guys are laughing their heads off about it.

Patrik wishes he wouldn’t get bothered about it, but something flares up angry and possessive in his gut. Kyle lies beside him at night and changes his dreams just like he’s changing his game, just like he’s taken a terrible October and given him a golden November.

Eleven goals down and thirty-nine to go. Patrik tapes his stick in short, practiced motions. Forward and back, laps around the blade like laps around the rink. Folding the loose end over itself and pressing in a tight crease, edges of the tape aligned like the perfect wrister. Everything in hockey is the same, patterns and repeated motions.

Patrik repeats himself. When Kyle jumps into his arms after his first goal screaming, “Another one! Holy shit!”, Patrik repeats himself. He gives Kyle another one, scoring a second time later in the game. Thirty-seven to go.

Kyle’s liquid that night, falling into bed like a virgin. Then, wait, like a _what?_ Patrik fumbles with his button and has to pause for a breath before he can push it out of the hole. He turns to look at Kyle, the dark bruise of his hickey peeking out from the undershirt, and Patrik doesn’t think about the bruise on Nikolaj’s side. He thinks about a half-memory, a hazy evening kissing Kyle in a hotel room not unlike this one, something he woke up thinking about, something he can’t quite decide was real or fake.

There’s a stab of pain in his back. Patrik winces. “Gonna go grab some ice,” he mutters to no one in particular, shuffling out the door and down the hall to the ice machine. When he returns, he strips off his shirt, sits on the floor, and ices his back. Kyle lies in bed, watching him. Patrik can feel his eyes on him, but he keeps staring down at his phone, scrolling through nothing in particular.

In his head, Patrik counts his goals. It relaxes him, thinking through each one, picturing it in his head like he’s watching the replay. He’s always remembered them, since he was little and played half the time in net. There’s something about a net, the pleasing proportions of the red posts, the way the goalie fits so snugly inside and the way that Patrik’s shots find the corner anyway. If there’s an open space, Patrik finds it.

There’s an open space between him and Kyle now and Patrik’s not sure where it came from. He thinks it might’ve been last night, when in a dream or maybe in another lifetime they kissed until they couldn’t breathe. Or maybe even in Finland, when Kyle wormed his way into Patrik’s brain.

Maybe last spring, maybe last fall. Patrik remembers every tiny detail of his life in perfect clarity, so why can’t he remember when something changed between him and Kyle? He thinks maybe it all changed in the half-forgotten memories of dreams, where Kyle phased in and out and everything was too red or too blue.

Patrik’s back still hurts, but he dumps the ice and goes to bed. “Minnesota, next,” he says to Kyle, waiting for Kyle to give him something to dream about.

“Have you ever dreamt about the future?” Kyle asks, a curious look on his face. “Like, had a dream about something, and then it happened?”

“No,” Patrik says.

“Huh. That’s actually kind of surprising.” 

“I dunno. You’re the one in charge here, not me.” Patrik yawns around his words.

“Well, dream about what happens when November ends, then,” Kyle says, rolling onto his back. “If we’re gonna be so crazy that we believe in dream voodoo, we might as well believe in future-telling dream voodoo too.”

That night, Patrik and Kyle are weighed down by shackles. They pull down Patrik by his shoulder and tense his back. Pain shoots down his spine like lightning. Linked to him by chains, Kyle is pale as a ghost, hair wet and slicked back from his face. It's only when Patrik’s feet sink into the sand that he realizes they’re by the water somewhere, on a long coast. Waves lap at their ankles. The sand threatens to swallow them, dark gray and fine grained.

Despite struggling, they walk further into the waves, until they’re up to their knees, then their chests. Patrik’s knees buckle from the strain on his back and they collapse underwater, sinking deeper and deeper, the ocean suddenly a trench and not the shallows.

So he and Kyle fall, attached by the wrists by chains that drag them deeper by the second. Patrik tries to breathe but he can only gulp in ocean water. Blue turns to black and Patrik can’t see, can’t perceive where Kyle is. He thrashes around, unsure which direction is up.

Then: a hand on his wrist, another on his face. Kyle’s lips press chastely against his own, only for a moment, and then the bottom of the ocean opens up and drops Patrik onto cobblestoned city streets. It takes him a long moment to stand, the pain in his back nearly unbearable, and when he does the sun is too bright and Kyle is nowhere to be found. Patrik doesn’t know where he is, and the city streets are a labyrinth. The summer sun is scorching hot. Patrik wanders for a long time, barefoot and stumbling, dragging one hand along stucco walls and letting the other hang limp at his side, shoulder dislocated from the shackles.

Patrik wakes up slowly, blinking toward the ceiling. They fly to Minnesota today. Kyle is awake, sitting at the foot of his bed but still just in boxers, looking at his phone with an upset facial expression.

“You okay?” Patrik says groggily, words feeling garbled in his mouth.

“Huh? Oh.” Kyle jerks his head in a nod. “Yeah, I’m good. Hey, wanna grab breakfast?”

Kyle’s up in a flash, pulling Patrik out of bed, hand coming up to Patrik’s shoulder for a second. It hovers there a millisecond too long, but Patrik doesn’t pull away, and then Kyle blinks and smooths the neckline of Patrik’s t-shirt before dropping his hand.

Patrik touches the shoulder. It’s sore, and Patrik remembers the pain from the dream, so sharp and strong in the front of his mind as if it were real. His wrist is red, as if he had worn the shackles. At breakfast, Kyle reaches across the table for the maple syrup and his wrist is red too.

Kyle has always been red and white like the American flag but Patrik is blue. He’s blue with a red wrist and an aching shoulder, and last night he might’ve drowned. Maybe they both died and breakfast is… whatever comes next. They didn’t bother inviting the other guys on the team. Kyle douses his pancakes with maple syrup and Patrik vacantly wonders if there’s still a purple hickey on his collarbone.

**11**

**K.C.**

Kyle’s shaken from the dream last night but he’s pretty sure Patrik doesn’t notice. Every step he takes, the rising feeling in his stomach from sinking into the bottomless abyss returns, and his wrist still aches. Patrik cuts into his omelette and Kyle watches his shoulder, which was dislocated and purpled in the dream, but seems to be normal in the real world. 

Patrik’s still shooting like normal at practice, no perceptible issue with his shoulder, and Kyle breathes a sigh of relief. Patrik hits the boards and laughs and Kyle’s stomach rises all over again, but not from a sinking feeling. They win a drill and they hug and spin in circles, chirping the other guys. The mood is light, even though they lost in Calgary. Games against Minnesota are always fun, rough and fast-paced.

“Only two in Calgary after the hatty in Van, huh Patty?” Adam says on the bench, sliding in beside Kyle. “Only gonna get one tonight?”

“No, no,” Patrik protests, a wicked grin on his face. “Gotta get my goals per game back up. It’s getting a little too low.”

“Damn, gotta let KC have a couple too.” Adam slaps Kyle’s back.

“KC can have whatever he wants.” Kyle turns pink at the suggestive drawl of Patrik’s voice. That’s just how Patrik is, though. Adam smiles next to Kyle and says nothing.

They keep chirping in the locker room, dancing around one another with matching wrists rubbed raw. The feeling in the locker room is good, everyone excited about the month and what it means for the season to come. Kyle has a strange sensation at the back of his neck, a whisper when he notices that one voice is missing.

He turns and Nikolaj is hanging in his stall, not doing much but fiddling with his tape scissors. As the conversation lulls and the guys filter out to the bus, Kyle waits for everyone to clear out, the whisper at the back of his neck telling him to stay. Patrik gives him a tap on the shoulder when he leaves. Kyle pats his arm back, a quick moment of silent conversation.

The locker room is empty besides the two of them; Nikolaj looks up at him. “What’s up with that?” he asks as soon as Patrik is far enough away to not hear.

“What’s up with what?” Kyle replies, playing dumb and zipping his bag.

“The two of you.” Nikolaj doesn’t explain further, and he doesn’t need to.

Kyle shrugs. “Nothing.”

“But you wish there was.” Nikolaj’s voice is accusatory. Kyle fumbles with the zipper before regaining his cool. Patrik might not be the only one who wears his heart on his sleeve.

“And if I did? What say do you have in how I feel?”

“I’m not trying—”

Kyle’s voice comes out angrier than he intends. “I feel like you’ve lost any sort of, fuckin’, like, _claim_ to Patty you might’ve had, so—”

“Look! I know! I _know_. But he’s still my best friend, okay?” Nikolaj’s voice cracks. A lump rises in Kyle’s throat.

“I don’t think he knows that anymore.” Nikolaj draws his eyebrows in and frowns. Kyle sighs. “He’s not gonna get over you without your help,” he says, putting his hands on his knees and pushing himself upright.

Then, footsteps: Bryan walks back into the locker room. He pauses; the three of them look at each other. A thousand things go unsaid, and no one breaks the delicate balance of protecting the veil of silence. Bryan walks into his stall to collect a few things he must’ve forgotten.

“Big game tonight, eh boys?” He says.

Kyle and Nikolaj both nod.

“Good.” Bryan looks each of them in the eye in turn and leaves again. The unsaid hangs in the air: _Don’t do anything stupid. Don’t get into a stupid fight that would endanger the team._

Hockey is a team sport. Kyle and Nikolaj file out of the locker room to catch the bus back to the hotel. Kyle plays Fortnite for a while with Patrik and then they take dreamless pregame naps.

Patrik scores once against Minnesota that night. Kyle’s getting used to having his breath taken away. The game is just as rough and unforgiving as they expected it to be, and they drop it in a tough loss. But in some way it doesn’t even matter, because Patrik has scored six goals in three games. He smiles in spite of himself on the drive back to the hotel, giggling at everything Kyle says.

They sit on the floor of their hotel room again, in the narrow space between the beds, Patrik’s socked feet resting beside Kyle. His sweatpants are frayed at the bottom and he wiggles his toes in his socks.

“St. Louis tomorrow,” Kyle says, not saying much at all.

“Yeah.” Patrik puts his hands on his knees, five fingers on each splayed on onto faded writing.

“I have a good feeling,” Kyle starts to say, but there’s a knock at the door.

They look at each other. Neither of them stand. Then, again, another knock.

“Patty?” It’s Nikolaj’s voice. Kyle’s heart drops into his stomach. Patrik frowns, but he stands.

Kyle watches him, his sightline half-obstructed by the bed, as he walks to the door and opens it. Nikolaj’s standing in the doorway, looking very small in a hoodie.

“Hey,” he says. He pauses, peering into the room. “Is, uh, is Kyle…?”

Kyle pushes up onto his heels so his head pops up from between the beds. “Hey, Fly,” he says.

“Oh. Hey, KC.” He waves. Kyle feels nauseous. “Listen, Patty—”

“Let’s go walk,” Patrik interrupts, corralling Nikolaj out of the doorway. “Back soon,” Patrik calls back to Kyle as they go. The door shuts heavily behind them.

Kyle stands, then flops down on his back onto Patrik’s bed. He isn’t sure why, but he’s afraid. He knows as well as everyone on the team how things are (were?). Patrik and Nikolaj are best friends. Patrik loves Nikolaj and Nikolaj loves Patrik, but the _love_s aren’t synonyms. Patrik and Nikolaj spend money on Starbucks and shoes and Patrik will do anything Nikolaj says, even though he’ll be a little shit about it all the while.

Patrik and Nikolaj are _Patrik-and-Nikolaj_, and Kyle isn’t sure what _Patrik-and-Kyle_ is. Nikolaj doesn’t have any claim to Patrik, but Kyle doesn’t either. But he wants to. He wants to stake his claim and he wants claim staked upon him too.

When Patrik comes back, opening and shutting the door carefully so it barely makes a sound, Kyle’s still laying back on Patrik’s bed, leant with his feet on the floor between the two beds. Patrik walks over without saying anything and climbs onto the bed, sitting cross-legged by Kyle’s head.

“How’d it go?” Kyle looks up at Patrik. From this angle, he’s upside-down.

He shrugs. “He’s still my best friend.” He pinches his lips together, then smiles. From Kyle’s angle, it looks like a frown. “That’s all I want. For him to be my best friend.”

Kyle breathes in the silence, letting it settle around them.

Patrik reaches down and tugs lightly on a lock of Kyle’s hair. “It’s long.”

“I like it.”

“Me too.”

Kyle brushes his teeth and then pulls out the hospital corners of his bed before crawling under the covers. Patrik takes his turn in the bathroom and gets in bed too.

“Make me a good dream tonight, KC. The best dream.”

“That’s a lot of pressure.” Kyle smiles sleepily.

“I think we deserve it, though,” Patrik replies.

Kyle pauses at _we_. He can tell himself a thousand times that every dream is a coincidence, that it’s not actually Patrik crawling into his unconscious, but every night he’s there again, taking up space the way he does in Kyle’s brain. Kyle isn’t sure what he’d do without the ever present whisper of _Patrik_ in his brain at this point.

“Here’s the deal.” Kyle stretches his arms out above his head. “You dream about me, and I’ll dream about you.”

“Deal.” Patrik’s crooked grin in smushed against the pillow.

Kyle’s sitting on a hockey bench. It’s cold, and he pulls the sleeves of his sweater over his hands. It’s an outdoor rink, and the sky is cloudlessly blue. On the ice, two kids are skating around playing shinny. They each have a shock of blonde hair, white as the snow falling around them. One of the kids, the bigger of the two, skates circles around the other, dangling around them with ease. 

“Pinja was always a good sport,” Patrik says. Kyle looks up at him, not having noticed him there before, and then it dawns on him. Of _course _the kids are Patrik and his sister. The bigger kid is tall and lanky and white-blonde the same way Patrik is. He skates the same awkward way with his elbow up. 

On the ice, Patrik skates to the net and tries to shoot, completely fanning on the attempt and falling on his face in the process. Next to Kyle, Patrik coughs out a laugh.

“I’ve improved since,” he says. Kyle smiles. Patrik shrugs in his sweatshirt, a worn out thing with _TAPPARA_ written across the front.

“Your skating hasn’t,” Kyle chirps. Patrik smirks and shoves his shoulder.

The Patrik on the ice passes back and forth with Pinja. They skate and laugh, their high-pitched young voices ringing out in the empty winter morning. They race the length of the rink, Pinja struggling to keep up. She hits an edge on the uneven ice and falls flat, instantly bursting into tears. The younger Patrik skates to her immediately, helping her sit up and inspecting the bleeding scrape on her chin.

“She still has a scar,” Patrik says lowly. “She’ll never let me forget that.”

“You match,” Kyle responds, reaching a finger out and poking the faint scar on Patrik’s chin from a high-stick last season.

“Yeah, guess so.”

When they turn back to the ice, the picture melts away and there’s a new outdoor rink in front of them, one that Kyle recognizes immediately. It feels like vertigo, stepping directly into one of his own memories. Jacob and Krystal are bickering over sticks while Kyle single-mindedly practices his shot on the ice. Mornings like this growing up were the best of Kyle’s life. He could skate all day, listening to his siblings goof off behind him, then go home and drink hot chocolate and wrestle over the best GameCube controller.

“They’re younger than you?” Patrik asks.

Kyle nods. “I like being a big brother.”

“Me too.”

Jacob and Krystal keep arguing until Kyle drops his stick and skates over in three confident strides. They look at him guiltily and he shoves one stick in each of their hands, saying something that Kyle and Patrik can’t hear from the bench.

Patrik grins. “You like being in charge,” he says, leans into Kyle’s space, looking down at him. Kyle doesn’t back away. He cocks his head and doesn’t deny it.

Kyle’s shoved roughly from the side, and he turns to find himself no longer on the bench of an outdoor rink, but rather an indoor one with a dozen or so teenagers skating around lazily, most likely warming up before practice. A broad guy brushes past him like he’s not really there as he pushes out onto the ice.

He looks up; the empty arena is strangely familiar, though not enough that Kyle can place it. It’s not an NHL arena. The teens on the ice are in blue, and in the same moment that Kyle realizes it’s the Finnish national team jersey, three guys push by him all at once, laughing loudly and chattering in a language Kyle doesn’t speak. The one in the middle, blonde hair to his shoulders, has his arm wrapped around the shorter one on his left. The other tall one lumbers behind.

“Hartwall,” Patrik whispers beside him, reverence in his voice.

And Kyle understands. Hartwall is the arena they began the month in, Patrik with four goals in two games, the same arena that he won World Juniors in 2016 in. On the ice, the eighteen-year-old Patrik is shoved around by the other two as they laugh. Kyle recognizes them, Sebastian Aho and Jesse Puljujarvi.

“Man, a couple weeks really can change your life, huh?” Kyle says, thinking about how Finland took the world into its vice grip that year, dominated the tournament following the lead of the first line.

Patrik looks at Kyle like he’s realizing something. “Yeah, I guess so,” he says.

They sit and watch their warm-up, voices echoing in the empty arena. Patrik sets up on the dot and fires consecutive one-timers into the corners of the net, the triangles of space between the shoulders of the goalie and the posts.

Patrik scoffs. “I’ve improved,” he says, that wicked crooked grin in his voice.

Kyle watches the younger Patrik score one after another: _ping ping ping_, bardown every time, as the scene melts and he’s jostled to standing, suddenly surrounded by thousands of people all in blue. The rink is different from the stands than it is from the ice but Kyle knows where they are anyway, even before he looks down and sees the M on the ice.

Patrik’s shoved by a few drunk students and stumbles into Kyle’s side, grabbing his arm to steady himself. Patrik looks at him, wide-eyed. The students roar as the players skate the length of the ice. Kyle points at the one whose back says eighteen.

“It’s me!” he yells to Patrik over the din of the crowd. Number eighteen dekes a defender and backhands the puck into the net. The students scream as the goal horn goes off, a sea of blue t-shirts shaking the walls.

“You were… eighteen?” Patrik asks.

“Huh?” Kyle says, not comprehending what he means.

Patrik tugs on Kyle’s sleeve where his number eighty-one belongs. “You weren’t eighty-one,” he says, seeming confused, almost distressed.

“Not then, no.”

“I’ve always been twenty-nine,” Patrik says. “Always. Never changed.”

“It’s good for things to change sometimes, though, isn’t it?” The building shakes around them, students chanting and stomping their feet. The world of the dream is warped and illusory but Patrik’s edges are perfectly clear.

He stares at Kyle in his curious way. Time slows down. The dream melts around Kyle, students disappearing and the arena going dark. Patrik and Kyle fall through the abyss of empty space. Patrik reaches out to Kyle and Kyle reaches back, stretching until their hands just barely touch.

Kyle wakes up. Before he looks over, he knows Patrik’s awake too. Two blue eyes are trained on him, the same as in the dream.

Patrik rolls out of bed, takes two steps, and sits down at the foot of Kyle’s bed. He pats Kyle’s foot through the bedspread. “St. Louis,” is all he says before standing and walking to the bathroom, the door clicking shut behind him.

“Sit with me today,” Patrik asserts as they stroll the runway. It’s not a question or a request.

“Even when you’re rolling?” Kyle asks. Patrik’s in the same suit he’s worn all month. When they get to St. Louis, Kyle knows exactly what order he’ll get dressed in, exactly which stretches he’ll do.

“Yeah.” Patrik nods. “It feels right. To have a little change.”

So Kyle follows Patrik, white blonde hair sticking out of a beanie, moles on the back of a neck, onto the jet to the row where Brandon is already sitting in the seat next to the one Patrik sits in.

“Sorry Rusty,” Patrik says, standing in the aisle. “I’m kicking you out. Go bother J-Mo.”

Brandon grumbles but acquiesces because Patrik is weird and fickle about some things but he’s scored eleven goals so far this month so they all follow his whims. Patrik stares at Kyle until he slides into the window seat. Patrik drops into the seat beside him and conjures a deck of cards seemingly out of nowhere.

“So,” he says, shuffling the deck, “this is how you play Snarples.”

Kyle watches his hands, the flex and bend of his fingers as he adjusts the deck and deals the cards.

  
**12, 13, 14, 15, 16**

**P.L.**

The world is blue when they land in St. Louis. The city is blue and Patrik is too. Something feels different about this day. They play St. Louis that night; on the bus ride to the arena, the city sky is a mural of red and blue, the horizon aflame. “Whoa,” Kyle murmurs. Patrik stares up without speaking, counting the clouds.

Patrik doesn’t know what to say about the game. He scores five times and each time and each time Kyle flushes a deeper red and his words are less coherent. By the end of the game, Patrik is five goals richer toward fifty and toward a summer contract, and there’s someone back in Winnipeg who’s a million dollars richer. Patrik doesn’t know their name, but all it took was one good night to change their life.

Patrik knows about how one night can change a life. _You’re so beautiful, Nicky_. _Let me make you mine_.

After the game, he’s speechless. He smiles through his post-game and the drive back to the hotel. The sky is dark now, and Patrik swims in the blue. He leans against Kyle’s arm. Kyle looks up at him, and he knows. They know each other inside and out now. They’ve seen each other’s unconscious in the muscle memory of the sport, the subconscious in the messy haze of dreams, the most hidden corners of one another along with the things they wear on their sleeves.

Patrik still has the reminder of _fifty_ written on his hand, and Kyle’s sleeves still say eighty-one. Patrik is blue and he blends in with the city. Kyle is red and white like the sunset burning the horizon. When they get to the hotel, Patrik doesn’t take the window bed and he doesn’t pull out his hospital corners. He sits beside Kyle and takes his hand.

“Weird month,” he says.

Kyle squeezes his hand. “Good month.”

Patrik wants to kiss him. He wants to remember it, too. He doesn’t want it to slip from his grasp when he opens his eyes and it’s morning. He wants to memorize Kyle’s mouth and the way his long hair feels in his fist.

Kyle pulls Patrik’s tie off and discards it on the floor. He undoes the top two buttons of Patrik’s shirt next, letting his hands linger afterward.

“Let me make you mine,” He murmurs, hands on Patrik’s chest, breath warm against his neck.

“I, uh, _fuck_,” he replies, wrapping his hands around Kyle’s waist. “I think I’ve been yours a while now.”

Patrik kisses Kyle and he doesn’t stop. 

And he doesn’t stop.

And Patrik thinks, one night can change your life.

**17, 18**

**K.C.**

When they wake up together, the sky is a cotton candy pink sunrise. The team leaves St. Louis and they go home, two more games in Winnipeg to end November. Kyle remembers the dream they shared, but he decides to keep it between the two of them.

Patrik doesn’t score against Pittsburgh, but when Chicago comes around for the last game of the month, he does twice, number seventeen and eighteen on the month.

“Eighteen,” he tells Kyle, poking Kyle’s sleeve where it says eighty-one. Patrik’s voice is calm and even, as if eighteen goals in one month, in twelve games, should be normal. Nothing Patrik does is normal.

After the game, Patrik’s undressed faster than anyone and then he sits, staring at Kyle with his hands folded. Waiting. Everyone knows Patrik wears his heart on his sleeve. Kyle’s fingers stop working as he feels the gaze trained on him; he can’t seem to unbuckle his gear or find the seams of tape to rip up. His hands are red.

Kyle untapes his socks and watches out of the corner of his eye as Nikolaj walks over to Patrik’s stall. They clap their hands together. Nikolaj pats Patrik’s shoulder firmly. “Great fuckin’ month, bud,” Nikolaj says.

“You too, man.” They fist-bump and Nikolaj walks away.

They’re in their suits in the parking lot. “Come home with me, KC,” Patrik says.

Kyle goes home with Patrik. There’s only one day left in November and Kyle isn’t sure what comes next. Patrik will be named first star of the month, but then what? November is blue but December could be anything. When they kiss, a thousand colors and a thousand possibilities for the future burst behind his eyelids.

When he’s inside Kyle, Patrik lies flat on his back because it hurts less. When he comes, it’s with his eyes squeezed shut and a whimper of a gasp. It might be the first time Kyle’s ever seen him vulnerable.

After, Kyle holds the cold-pack for him, low on his spine where Patrik says it hurts the most. They lie naked in the quiet for a while, tracing shapes on each other’s skin.

Kyle gets up to dump the ice after a little while. For a moment, maybe only a trick of the light, the place on Patrik’s back where the cold-pack was looks blue. He lies with his arm around him, his other hand brushing down the blonde hair at the back of Patrik’s neck. “Dream about the future with me?” he asks.

Patrik freezes and wraps his hand around Kyle’s wrist. It’s still a little sore. “No,” he says quickly. His grip loosens on Kyle’s wrist. He rubs his thumb gently along the underside, where the red is finally fading. “Let’s just dream about staying like this.”

Kyle touches the shoulder that was never dislocated except in a dream. Goosebumps rise on Patrik’s skin. He flips over to face Kyle, kissing him slowly. Kyle holds him by the waist as he kisses down his throat, all the way to the fading purple mark on Kyle’s collarbone.

Patrik bites the mark. “I made you mine in my dreams,” he murmurs against his skin.

“Yeah," Kyle breathes. “You’re mine.”

Their legs are tangled in bed as they slip into sleep. There’s one more day left in a blue November.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! :D
> 
> i live part-time in st. louis and i wanna say real fast re: the ending that st. louis deadass does have some of the most absurdly beautiful sunsets, like, every single night. idk what it is! but i love it!
> 
> also ps when i was about 90% done with this i learned that patrik and kyle are both fire signs which if you know the taylor swift song state of grace, theres a line "just twin fire signs / four blue eyes" and im really losing my mind over it!
> 
> <3


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